Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook account hacked

“Let the hacking begin,” an apparent hacker posted as a status from Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook account yesterday. If Facebook founder and CEO isn’t safe from hackers, who is?

The hacker also alluded to the 2011 Facebook Hacker Cup and offered commentary on the direction the social networking giant should take. The full status reads,

Let the hacking begin: If facebook [sic] needs money, instead of going to the banks, why doesn’t Facebook let its users invest in Facebook in a social way? Why not transform Facebook into a ‘social business’ the way Nobel Price [sic] winner Muhammad Yunus described it? http://bit.ly/fs6rT3 What do you think? #hackercup2011

The post has since been removed, but not before receiving more than 1,800 likes and 500 comments. This is the second high-profile Facebook hack this week.

Facebook has already begun a campaign to improve the site’s security, most notably with the introduction of social captcha, a new version of the text-based security system. Now instead of deciphering random letters to prove that you’re a human, Facebook will show you several pictures of one of your friends and ask you to identify him or her. The idea is that if hackers don’t know your friends they can’t access your account.

But Facebook seems to be missing something obvious here: do you know your friends? Facebook reports that the average user has a modest 130 friends. But let’s be honest: how many people do you know with upwards of a thousand virtual friends? Can anyone possibly identify that many people?

That aside, what about the trend of tagging people in pictures they aren’t in? One of my recently tagged pictures is the guitarist for a band my friend saw because she “thought I would appreciate his shirt.” I don’t know about you, but I’d be pretty alarmed if any of my friends were able to identify that as a picture of me.

The best bet seems to be switching to an HTTPS secured connection (a secure connection already used on banks’ websites). At least we can assume the Zuckerberg hack will catalyze this process.